Athena's Role In The Odyssey

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Throughout history, women have played a significant role in the lives of men in the humanities. There have been countless men who have embarked on their own journeys, each one with a different story, and for each one of them, they have had a female figure affect the way in which their story plays out. These female characters can be guides to them, but also the guiding force to their story’s descent. In The Odyssey of Homer, the female lead that had a major effect in the story was Athena and how she played the role of a mentor, maybe even the role of a father figure to Telemachus in the absence of his father. In this epic, Athena presents herself to Telemachus for the first time as a mentor right after the suitors are introduced trying to win …show more content…
To keep things going, Sonia never once left his side and even told him herself that she would follow Raskolnikov to Siberia where he would have to complete the sentence he was given. In the end, not only can female figures positively affect these male protagonists, but they can have such drastic changes on someone to completely change their lives, just how Sonia changed Raskolnikov’s life. Moving on to a different aspect, although female characters can play good guiding roles, they can also be the reason why some of the protagonists in these stories go down different, more negative paths, and one of these roles is seen through the book Frankenstein. In Frankenstein, this aspect of a female playing significance to why a character has a descent in their journey can be seen when the main protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, has his beloved wife, Elizabeth, taken from him, “She was there, lifeless and inanimate.”(Shelley, 144). The absence of Victor’s wife affects the way he goes through the rest of the story because as a newly-wed, he had become one with Elizabeth, she symbolized part of him, and that got taken away from him by his own
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